User Profile

Alecs Ștefănescu

catileptic@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 1 month ago

i'm an activist thriving on layers and layers of affinity for shades of nuance. i have a life-long love for the Weird / Uncanny / Unheimlich.

chaos.social/@catileptic

This link opens in a pop-up window

"On the front of geopolitics, we find increasing resistance against American imperialism along with the homogenisation that it brought about. Such resistance in the name of national security ends up in calls for autonomy and state sovereignty on one hand, and a multipolar world on the other. But how different are they from the call for Heimat, for the return to the state in the name of the people? That is however not a solution that we should look to in order to resolve the planetary crisis in the twenty-first century, since increasing competition between states will never put an end to wars and to the intensifying exploitation of the planet. The longing for Heimat has become a global melodrama in the past century, expressing itself as antagonism between self and other, leading to conflicts of all kinds. Therefore, we must envision our journey by looking at it from the standpoint of Heimatlosigkeit."

Post-Europe by  (Page 119)

Kathe Koja: The Cipher (1991, Dell)

Nicholas is a would-be poet and video-store clerk with a weeping hole in his hand …

The Cipher is addictive. The first-person narration manages to name a lot of details, to make room for a lot of backstory, while still sounding like it could be the transcript of someone telling you a really long anecdote.

The "horror" of the entire novel is, perhaps, contained in how fast the unbelievable becomes mundane. In how easy it is to accept the premise of the book and perhaps wonder what we might do, faced with similar circumstances.

Slavoj Zizek: Against Progress (2024, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc)

To define 'progress' is to lay claim to the future. Seminal thinker Slavoj Žižek turns …

Why did this apparently irrational strategy work? Because the knowledge contained in ‘Of course we know very well’ is not neutral : its objectivity is already biased. What we ‘know very well’, what is ‘obvious’, what is accepted as a matter of course, is not written in stone, but in shi# ing sand; it is a socially-constructed shared hegemonic opinion which obfuscates its owns cracks and inconsistencies in order to seem immutable, and our task is to change it. Th e point is not to provide ‘alternative facts’, but to undermine the framing that makes us select some facts and ignore others. This is why we are not dealing here with the usual disavowal but with a courageous act of taking a risk and ignoring our apparent limitations. Our stance should be: we know we appear weak and divided, but we should nevertheless do what has to be done. We know (or feel with the force of seeming knowledge) that we cannot avert environmental collapse, but we should still take the actions that would give us the best chance of doing so. In such a situation, where apocalypse is on the horizon, one should bear in mind that the standard logic of probability no longer applies – we need a different logic, that described by Jean-Pierre Dupuy:

"The catastrophic event is inscribed into the future as a destiny, for sure, but also as a contingent accident . . . [I]f an outstanding event takes place, a catastrophe, for example, it could not not have taken place; nonetheless, insofar as it did not take place, it is not inevitable. It is thus the event’s actualization – the fact that it takes place – which retroactively creates its necessity."

Against Progress by 

Slavoj Zizek: Against Progress (2024, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc)

To define 'progress' is to lay claim to the future. Seminal thinker Slavoj Žižek turns …

Žižek allowed some optimism to slip through his critique

"Against Progress" is a collection of essay that are digestible and lend themselves to be re-read several times. This is unlike my experience reading anything else Žižek wrote, so I am extremely thankful for meeting the author in a milder form. In a way, these essays feel like refined, denser, more strongly phrased versions of his explorations posted on Substack.

The entire collection is timely and addresses the present directly, head-on. Reading it, I wish that this were an eternal collection, and that he was adding essay after essay as the weeks went by, as the world plunged into a painful reckoning with fascism. I wish I could have read his views on things I was seeing on the news, described in the careful and clear-minded way these essays do. But, then again, such essays, I know, can only emerge some distance away from what they describe.

Highly recommended read.

Han Kang: The Vegetarian (EBook, 2016, Hogarth)

Before the nightmare, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary life. But when splintering, blood-soaked …

Silence as violence

The first two thirds of the book were a chorus that I am all too familiar with: some men turn everything they touch into burning pain. Han Kang allows us to experience patriarchal violence both through the eyes of the men, and through the thoughts of the women they hurt. The book opens with a first-person view that made me feel the familiar nausea of realising that the women are trapped narcissistic men.

There's only one character whose inner thoughts we never read, except through her dreams. And, honestly, after the last third of the book, I feel like reading her thoughts would have been too much to bear. Perhaps even too much to imagine, as an author.

The silence of the main character feels like a different kind of violence. Just like "Greek Lessons", it feels to me like Han Kang portrays women fighting back at the men that …

Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism (EBook, 2009, Zero Books)

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? explores Fisher's concept of "capitalist realism," which he takes …

A lightweight must-read

I should have read Mark Fisher's "Capitalist Realism" at the very beginning of my incursion into philosophy - it would have made many concepts easier to grasp. It's a solid introduction to concepts such as "reality versus The Real", "the big Other", to the critique of ideology.

The tone is closer to "anecdotes told over beer" than to a formal philosophical essay. To my understanding, the book is, after all, an extension of ideas that Fisher was already writing about on his blog.